The Definition of Insanity...

...is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Every morning, sometime between 2am and 6am, our dogs decide they are bored and want to wander outside for a little while. So they waltz into our bedroom and start beating my husband with their cold, wet snouts. They pick his arms up and fling them up in the air. They nudge his head around. They wake him up and, inevitably, he gets up and lets them out!

This seems to be a fairly direct cause-and-effect chain to me. They beat him. He rewards them. They continue beating him. When I point out this chain of logic for my husband, he agrees but insists he is powerless to change anything. Apparently the dogs hold all power in our household and are capable of compelling obedience. He claims 1) the dogs are determined to wake so he may as well capitulate and 2) if he does not, they will retaliate by making a mess. Of course, he always gives in so there is really no way of testing either hypothesis.

This morning something changed. This morning, when the dog started pushing Scott around, I woke up and crawled over Scott to sleep on the edge of the bed between him and the dog. And nothing happened. The dog went away and left us alone. She didn't make a mess. The world didn't come to an end.